ABM vendor DemandBase announced a new dataset it calls the DemandGraph which combines its WhoToo dataset of crawled business information with Spiderbook relationship data.  The expanded content set employs semantic mining and machine learning to assemble the “entire business network of a company” which helps  “identify which companies and buying committees are in-market for particular solutions.”  The DemandGraph helps users target in-market accounts, identify key buyers, uncover meaningful insights, and deliver personalized content.  While they have not announced specific predictive tools or capabilities, they are hinting at such tools.

This expanded information set of customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, and investments is built from:

• Unstructured business knowledge such as SEC filings and annual reports
• Demandbase’s proprietary identification technology that maps billions of network IP addresses to businesses worldwide
• Complex corporate hierarchies extending beyond subsidiaries and remote offices to include vendor, customer and partner relationships
• The digital footprint of web activity by businesses including ad impressions and web traffic from more than 3 billion B2B interactions every month

“DemandGraph isn’t exactly a product but rather a resource that Demandbase will use to power other products,” said analyst David Raab of Raab Associates.  “It lets Demandbase more easily build detailed profiles of people and companies, including history, interests, and relationships. It can then use the information to predict future purchases and guide marketing and sales messages. There’s also a liberal sprinkling of artificial intelligence throughout DemandGraph, used mostly in Spiderbook’s processing of unstructured Web data but also in some of the predictive functions. If I’m sounding vague here it’s because, frankly, so was Demandbase. But it’s still clear that DemandGraph represents a major improvement in the power and scope of data available to business marketers.”

The DemandGraph captures what I’ve long called the “company ecosystem” that goes beyond lists of competitors to include partners, advisors, investors, customers, etc.  An understanding of corporate relationships creates an opportunity to extend beyond traditional six degrees solutions when looking for introductions and relationships.  A few companies have attempted to gather this data, but none have figured out how to market this broader relationship intelligence outside of industry niches such as technology (e.g. DiscoverOrg, RainKing, HG Data), advertising (e.g. TheList/WinMo), and PE/VC datasets (e.g. CB Insights, Mattermark, DataFox, Crunchbase).

Likewise, when LinkedIn describes their Economic Graph, they are focused on people and their relationships to other people and organizations, not the relationships between organizations.

Demandbase claims that company relationships captured within their business graphs offer twenty times the predictive power of social network relationships.  Demandbase SVP of Technology Aman Naimat asserted that “DemandGraph has proven that it can be 7-8 times more accurate than an account executive trying to predict a potential customer, which provides better targeting and conversion.”

Chief Product Officer Alan Fletcher dubbed DemandGraph a “personal concierge” which supports personalization across all sales and marketing touchpoints. “That consistency in messaging throughout the whole sales funnel is what we’re trying to do, and you can only do that if you have the underlying data.  It’s what the best account managers already do today, but it obviously doesn’t scale. Large companies can only do it for their top 200 targets.”

Fletcher suggested that this relationship ecosystem is also predictive of investments, acquisitions, and potential partnerships but that the company is “focused on predicting the next customer.”  The DemandGraph provides insights into the culture of an organization.  “Do they do businesses with startups?  Do they only like to do business with established companies?  Do they typically sell t0 people that are only involved with McKinsey?” asked Fletcher.  “There are a bunch of signals that may not be directly related to you and your products.”